PDP Says Buhari's Certificate is Forged

PDP Says Buhari's Certificate is Forged

• Says it's super-imposed
•  Principal: If you are in doubt, come an‎d see the original document sent to us

Chuks Okocha in Abuja

Despite the presentation of the secondary certificate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential candidate, General Muhammadu Buhari, by his school, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Presidential Campaign Organisation (PCO) has described the document as"'Oluwole" - a euphemism for forgery - and tendered evidence.

But the Principal of Government Collage, Katsina, Alhaji  Isiyaku Bello Bello, in a swift reaction, told THISDAY: "If they are doubting the result, then they should come and see the authentic copy and not the photocopy sent to us by the Cambridge West Africa School. We are here waiting for anybody doubting what we have sent out."

But addressing news men on Thursday, the PDP Presidential Campaign spokesman, Femi Fani Kayode, said, "The results sheet which was attributed to the Cambridge examination body is clearly a super-imposition of one document on another as you will shortly see in the enlarged image of the result sheet as published. The column lines on the part where names are printed do not align with the blank columns while there is an introduction of extraneous lines on some other columns."

He tried to illustrated from a computer the super-imposition on the photo-copied result sheet. "The document contains an obvious alteration on the Mathematics column of the candidate, Mohamed Buhari, who was assumed to have scored an “F” in the subject," Fani-Kayode continued. "This raises a very fundamental issue of validity in view of the fact that the accompanying result sheet states that “any alteration or erasure renders this statement of Results invalid. This is the standard practice in all interpretation of documents, especially academic records.

"The question we put to Gen Buhari and his party is whether this alteration was done by the University of Cambridge.  One of the footnotes on the document purportedly issued by the University of Cambridge says: 'The results of this candidate in all subjects except English Language have been carried forward from the 1960 examination.' The question arising from this is: When exactly did Buhari sit for all the other subjects claimed to have been passed in the secondary school examination?

"Our conclusion from all these is that the documents purportedly released by Government College (Pilot) Katsina, upon which the APC Presidential candidates hopes to bury the doubt about his eligibility for next month’s election are forged, manipulated and fraudulently procured. They are therefore untenable in fact and in law.

"We do not know who the authors and masterminds of this forgery are but whoever they are, we urge them to come forward and be identified. If they fail to come forward voluntarily, we hereby call on the Police and other security agencies to seek them out, find them, arrest them, interrogate them and prosecute them in accordance with the laws of the land."